Billy Donovan

Billy Donovan
William John Donovan, Jr.is an American professional basketball coach who is currently the head coach of the Oklahoma City Thunder of the National Basketball Association. He previously spent 19 seasons at the University of Florida, where his Florida Gators men's basketball teams won two NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championships in 2006 and 2007. Donovan has more wins than any other coach in the history of the Florida basketball program, and he coached the Gators to more NCAA tournament appearances,...
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth30 May 1965
CityRockville Centre, NY
My biggest thing with the crowd coming on the court was just in terms of the players' safety. It looks good on TV, but you're always concerned or worried that there is going to be some type of altercation.
I don't think you can win without it. That's the biggest challenge we as coaches face every year.
One of the biggest things to stop is momentum. There are always teams that can get on a roll. Some people say that if you have won 15 games in a row, it's good to take a loss into the (NCAA) tournament. Other people say that if you lose a game, your confidence level is lower, that you are not going into the tournament playing your best. I always say that just because you lose, you can still play well. You can get beat by a better team.
It was a good win for us. Vanderbilt is a very good basketball team. Vanderbilt is a very difficult team to play against. The biggest thing is that our basketball team is still learning. Vanderbilt did some things to us at first where we had to settle in and we picked it up, certainly in the second half, but the first 10 minutes were tough.
The biggest thing with the NCAA Tournament is to try to get across to your guys that there's a lot of drama and a lot of changing of routines. Any road game, we've never come in a day and a half early. We have to go to a mandatory shoot-around, we have to go to press conferences. When we go on the road to Alabama, no one cares we're in town. This is an event. For some guys, that can add pressure.
The biggest thing to with Villanova to me is it's not only quickness, it's the physicality. I thought last year's game that we played them, they were by far the most physical team we played against.
The biggest thing is, our kids play the game the right way. They're going to make the extra pass and move the basketball. We're averaging almost 20 assists.
The biggest thing for David is to make good decisions and play very hard. There are some games, athletically, where what David can do is stretch the defense and really shoot it. So, we have to make sure in this game (Ole Miss) that we have him in the right match-up situation because they have so much quickness.
We're just a basketball team that doesn't have a lot of depth right now. That's our biggest challenge.
It was great to see Lee letting it go and shooting it. He's always taken 3s, but the biggest change I saw with him was the confidence.
It was great to see him shoot the basketball and let it go with the confidence he did. The biggest thing I look at with Lee is the confidence level he's shooting the ball with. Tonight, he was just letting it go and shooting it with a great deal of confidence.
We tried to make them score outside their offense. We gave up 10 offensive rebounds in the first half, but in the second half I felt like their frontcourt was fatigued.
We just recently had a function where we had to go into the student assistance fund to get players some clothes. Some of our kids come from backgrounds where getting a suit on short notice is difficult.
We just wanted to continually attack and mix up our defenses.